Hi, I'm Robert J. (Bob) Oglesby, and I'm a professor of climate modeling in the School of Natural Resources with a joint appointment in the Department of Earth &amp; Atmospheric Sciences. My research interests are many and broad. They are highly interdisciplinary and focused on understanding important physical processes of climate. Much of my work is aimed at understanding the controls on drought, a phenomenon that is constantly in the minds of all who live in the Great Plains and other semi-arid regions around the globe. I do this by evaluating and understanding land surface-atmosphere interactions, with particular applications to climate prediction (especially precipitation) on seasonal and longer scales. Other broad-based research interests include the effects of changes in land use patterns (especially due to agriculture practices) on climate, sensitivity of climate to global changes in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and the effects of tropical deforestation on climate, all of which have potentially profound implications for society.

I perform this research by using cutting-edge global and regional climate models to help understand the complex web of physical processes that maintain the present-day climate -- how it has changed in the past, and most importantly, how it may change in the future due to natural and human factors.

I came to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006 from a position with NASA, where I had been the senior scientist for the Global Hydrology and Climate Center of the Marshall Space Flight Center since 2001. Prior to that, I was a faculty member in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Purdue University for nearly 10 years. I've taught on the undergraduate and graduate levels in climate studies, atmospheric dynamics, oceanography, and other related fields.

While my teaching responsibilities are technically only in the Department of Geosciences, I design my courses to appeal to interested students campus-wide. My seminal undergraduate course is "The Climate System," a rigorous but approachable development of how the present-day climate is maintained, how it was different in the past, and importantly, how it may change in the future. A graduate-only version, "Theory of Climate," covers much of the same material but at a higher and more thorough level. I also teach graduate classes: "Climate Modeling," a hands-on, practical course, in which students learn how to use cutting-edge global and regional climate models to address real problems in climate and climate change, as well as "Paleoclimates," in which we use past climate changes as a guide to what may happen in the future.